I pay for the privilege of driving. You don't need a car or a drivers license to use the road, but it's sure faster than a bike.

Well most days at least...

Yes, but you pay the same price as the next guy. You aren't offered a deal, by your town office, to pay more in order to by-pass standard stop lights.

Actually you're paying taxes for the road probably local and state - everyone does that. The guy who doesn't have a car can't opt out of a portion of his property taxes that goes to road maintenance. You pay excise tax on your vehicle - that's an item tax - not used for roads for the most part, but used to track vehicles. You pay tolls to travel on certain roads - again a regressive tax.

One more edit - this is like the whole educational tax bit in reverse. How many times have you heard people complain about having no kids but having to pay property taxes knowing that 30% of the towns budget is for the school department?

Taxes (any money the government collects from the peeps) are meant to provide equally for all. I know there are many many examples of paying for excess or non-necessary service. I'm mostly against it all.

This is exactly the point. The guy that can dish out $85.00 doesn't need it to fly either. He's paying - the government, for privilege.

I guess I don't see the issue. He gets through line quicker, the government meets its needs for security, the extra labor gets paid for... I don't see a problem.

For an already occurring example, you can pay an extra charge to get your passport application expedited. Not everyone can afford to (it's an extra $60 plus overnight delivery postage) and not everyone cares enough to but, if you want it fast, you can pay to have it done.

Really you can call it whatever you'd like, it's still two levels of service for two different prices.

Elinda wrote:

One more edit - this is like the whole educational tax bit in reverse. How many times have you heard people complain about having no kids but having to pay property taxes knowing that 30% of the towns budget is for the school department?

Or about how people in another school district have nicer schools, ignoring the fact those residents voted to approve additional funding for their school.

I pay for the privilege of driving. You don't need a car or a drivers license to use the road, but it's sure faster than a bike.

Well most days at least...

Yes, but you pay the same price as the next guy. You aren't offered a deal, by your town office, to pay more in order to by-pass standard stop lights.

Not if the next guy doesn't drive a car. The bicyclist never has to pay a dime, and they can use the road all they want for their commute.

The guy who drives a bike still pays taxes that build and repair the road - just like the guy that drives the car on the road (sans the toll road). The bicycler on the toll road isn't supposed to be there, but if he is allowed on, I bet he has to pay a toll too.

You know who's making out on roads is the truckers. They basically pay nothing beyond normal taxes for using non-toll road (they do pay some additional taxes on diesel fuel) and they totally trash a perfectly good highway.

Do your gas taxes not pay for roads down there? That's how we pay for most of our road upkeep, through gas taxes and those tuckers burn through **** loads of it, so they pay their share and likely, then some.

The guy who drives a bike still pays taxes that build and repair the road - just like the guy that drives the car on the road (sans the toll road).

But he can't operate a motor vehicle there, he doesn't have the privilege of extra convenience. We all have to pay taxes on our airline tickets...

Elinda wrote:

You know who's making out on roads is the truckers. They basically pay nothing beyond normal taxes for using non-toll road (they do pay some additional taxes on diesel fuel) and they totally trash a perfectly good highway.

The guy who drives a bike still pays taxes that build and repair the road

Elinda wrote:

The guy who doesn't have a car can't opt out of a portion of his property taxes that goes to road maintenance.

Um, you've lost me...

They both say basically the same thing. If you own property in a community you pay taxes. If your town wants to build a new road, you pay for it with your taxes, regardless of whether you own a vehicle or not. ie the guy who drives a bike versus a car pays the same property taxes as the guy that drives the car. Similarly with schools, one pays the same rate of property taxes regardless of how many kids he may have.

Some states do use gas tax money for road maintenance. They use cig tax money for smoking cessation programs. It's fairly gimmicky and again highly regressive, but cigs at least are considered non-essential. Still the poor smoker is not likely to be utilizing the smoking cessation program and he's getting hit much harder with a per-pack tax than the guy with more financial means.

As someone with a degree in Security and Intel, I'm torn on the airport security aspect. On the one hand it provides jobs, but on the other hand it really is completely, 100% pointless, because you will never manage to stop that one crazy zealot from getting through if they are willing to die for it. We would be much better off financially and as a society if we just took a "well, **** happens" approach to alot of this and just went with the standard security precautions that the rest of the planet gets along just fine with. The liquid restriction for example. Could someone make a binary explosive bomb that would bring down an aircraft by combining liquids? Sure. But they could also swallow the liquids right before bording drug mule style and never be detected, and if they're going to blow themselves up anyways, they aren't worried about long term health risks. Could someone put a bomb in a shoe? Yes. Will it likely be large enough to even minorly inconveniance an aircraft? Probably not. yet every time I go to an airport they single out the guy with the big feet now.

We should concentrate on the simple, effective, and less obtrusive methods and scrap most of the rest of the system. While lowest bidder non background checked underpaid bribe susceptable safety workers are busy probing innocent grandmothers, Our nation's ship port facilities lack even basic sensors to detect a nuke. Guess which one I'm more worried about?

The aircraft already have door locks on the cockpits now. Hire more sky marshals. Put every passive sensor known to mankind on every wall of every terminal in the airports let everyone carry knives on aircraft again (try to hijack it with a boxcutter now, *****!) and cover the walls of the bulkheads in well publicized pig leather, and 90% of the problem goes away.

I don't want to take five hours to get through New Jersey when I can do it in thirty minutes.

Along these lines, tollways do help those who opt not to pay -- there's less people on the standard routes if a bunch of them paid to take the tollway.

In IL, gas taxes are allocated towards road infrastructure. I assume they use some state income taxes as well. And federal Dept. of Transportation grants. Tolls are supposed to be used exclusively on the tollway system but I have no idea how well they adhere to that in practice. Every once in a while someone tries to float a proposal to eliminate the tolls and just increase the gas taxes in the counties serviced by the toll system but it never goes anywhere. I don't use the toll roads much so I wouldn't be in favor of it anyway.

I understand Elinda's position but I don't necessarily agree with it. But I'm also more comfortable with comparisons within the sphere of travel (airline security, roadways, passports) than jumping clear out to education or fire services or some other unrelated area.

As someone with a degree in Security and Intel, I'm torn on the airport security aspect. On the one hand it provides jobs, but on the other hand it really is completely, 100% pointless, because you will never manage to stop that one crazy zealot from getting through if they are willing to die for it. We would be much better off financially and as a society if we just took a "well, sh*t happens" approach to alot of this and just went with the standard security precautions that the rest of the planet gets along just fine with.

I have to imagine that a true risk assessment and analysis would not lead to such high costs in airport security.

As someone with a degree in Security and Intel, I'm torn on the airport security aspect. On the one hand it provides jobs, but on the other hand it really is completely, 100% pointless, because you will never manage to stop that one crazy zealot from getting through if they are willing to die for it. We would be much better off financially and as a society if we just took a "well, sh*t happens" approach to alot of this and just went with the standard security precautions that the rest of the planet gets along just fine with.

I have to imagine that a true risk assessment and analysis would not lead to such high costs in airport security.